Hello gentlemen, I'm trying to produce a heater element to be incorporated into a steel valve body to maintain fluid temperature in the 1000K ballpark. Obviously I can't simply pass a copper wire so I'd be very grateful if anyone could give me the commercial names for the materials commonly used in heater elements as found on electrical stoves, etc, that have the steel pipe which glows red, ideally with some sort of internal filling to fill the air space inside for optimal thermal conductivity between the copper coil and the casing.

Thank you very much.

You may wish to see the answer provided by scientists to a question similar to yours:

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/mats05/mats0...

http://www.welding-advisers.com/

What do you mean by heating element material, the heater itself or its insulation?

Typically some thing like nichrome does the actual heating, and a variety of ceramic materials are used for insulation

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Calrods

IRStuff, I mean the insulation. The heating element is easy enough to make out of copper or steel wire if necessary. If you could give me a name for that ceramic so I could look for it, that'd be great.

Thanks for the replies so far I'll check them out.

Just to add, the power requirement will not be high. Something on the 5000W ballark which might not be trivial but I don't think would require any out-of-ordinary materials.

Watlow and Calrod are two of the big manufacturers of electric cartridge heaters.
the outer sheath is usually alloy 800, the heating element is nichrome or a similar high temp high resistance alloy, and they insulation is magnesium oxide. They string the wires inside the tube and fill with powdered oxide. Then they draw the tube down to a smaller diameter to consolidate the insulation.
Buy them, these are highly engineered products that rely on specific relationships of heat transfer and electrical resistance to function correctly.

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Plymouth Tube

Thank you Ed. I should've realized those heaters could be purchased way before posting. That's what I'll do.